Google is adding "photorealistic aerial views" to almost 100 landmarks in Google Maps, the company announced on Wednesday. The Verge reports: The views, which remind me of Apple Maps' Flyover feature, give you an overhead look at landmarks in cities including Barcelona, London, New York, San Francisco, and Tokyo, according to Google. The aerial views are a "first step" toward launching the "immersive view" the company showed off at Google I/O, according to a blog post from Google Maps director of product Amanda Leicht Moore. Immersive view will also include indoor views and information like traffic and the weather layered on the map, Google spokesperson Genevieve Park tells The Verge. At I/O, Google said immersive view would begin rolling out in Los Angeles, London, New York City, San Francisco, and Tokyo "later this year." Google Maps will also feature cycling routes, which will include additional information "like whether a specific road you'll be instructed to travel on is a major or minor road, if your route includes stairs or steep hills, and whether you can expect to hit heavy traffic," reports The Verge. Additionally, you'll be able to get notifications if someone who is sharing their location with you leaves or arrives at their location.

Instagram's head defended the app against a user backlash, after the social network launched a series of changes intended to make it more like its arch-rival TikTok. The Guardian reports: The changes, which include an extremely algorithmic main feed, a push for the service's TikTok-style "reels" videos, and heavy promotion of the TikTok-style "remix" feature, have resulted in users struggling to find content from friends and family, once the bread and butter of the social network. "We're hearing a lot of concerns from all of you," Adam Mosseri said in a video posted to Twitter. "I'm hearing a lot of concerns about photos, and how we're shifting to video. We're going to continue to support photos, but I need to be honest: more and more of Instagram is going to become video over time. We're going to have to lean in to that shift while continuing to support photos."

The Instagram boss also defended the platform's new "recommendations" feature, which puts content from people users do not follow on to their feed. "The idea is to help you discover new and interesting things on Instagram that you might not even know exist," he said. "You can snooze all recommendations for up to a month, but we're going to try and get better at recommendations because we think it's one of the best ways to help creators reach a new audience and grow their following. He added: "We're going to need to evolve, because the world is changing quickly and we're going to need to change with it."

Instagram's makeover is widely seen as a response to TikTok's continued growth, in particular among younger American users. [...] By boosting algorithmic recommendations, allowing users to "remix" posts (akin to TikTok's "Duet" feature), and promoting full-screen vertical video above photos, Instagram is attempting to turn its main app experience into something similar to that of the Chinese-owned upstart. In a widely shared story, Kardashian clan member and social media star, Kylie Jenner, called on the service to "make Instagram Instagram again." She added: "Stop trying to be TikTok, I just want to see cute photos of my friends."

UPDATE: Instagram Is Walking Back Its Changes For Now

Facebook parent company Meta has just reported its earnings for the second quarter of 2022, and it was another quarter of shrinking profits. Engadget reports: Total revenue of $28.8 billion was only down one percent compared to Q2 one year ago, but net income dropped 36 percent to $6.7 billion. Making almost $7 billion in profit is not a bad quarter for anyone, but the size of the decline compared to a year ago is pretty significant. And, according to the Wall Street Journal, this is the first-ever drop in revenue for Meta / Facebook -- so even though we're only talking one percent, it's still noteworthy.

Revenue from advertising and Meta's "family of apps" was essentially flat year-over-year, and Reality Labs (home to hardware like the Meta Quest and other metaverse-related initiatives) actually grew 48 percent year-over-year to $452 million. But Reality Labs accounted for a $2.8 billion loss this quarter, a 15 percent larger loss than Q2 one year ago. At this rate, it seems likely that Reality Labs will lose Meta more than the $10 billion it cost the company in 2021. Indeed, the company said it expects Reality Labs revenue to be lower in the third quarter. [...] In June, Meta said that it had 2.88 billion daily active users in its family of apps (which includes Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger) and 3.65 billion monthly active users, both of which are up four percent compared to a year ago. Facebook-specific growth was smaller, though -- average daily and monthly users only increased three percent and one percent, respectively. Further reading: FTC Files To Block Meta's Virtual Reality Deal

As reported by CNET, Google will allow law enforcement to access data from its Nest products -- or theoretically any other data you store with Google -- without a warrant. PetaPixel reports: "If we reasonably believe that we can prevent someone from dying or from suffering serious physical harm, we may provide information to a government agency -- for example, in the case of bomb threats, school shootings, kidnappings, suicide prevention, and missing person cases," reads Google's TOS page on government requests for user information. "We still consider these requests in light of applicable laws and our policies."

An unnamed Nest spokesperson did tell CNET that the company tries to give its users notice when it provides their data under these circumstances. Google "reserves the right" to make emergency disclosures to law enforcement even when there is no legal requirement to do so. "A provider like Google may disclose information to law enforcement without a subpoena or a warrant 'if the provider, in good faith, believes that an emergency involving danger of death or serious physical injury to any person requires disclosure without delay of communications relating to the emergency,'" a Nest spokesperson tells CNET.

While Amazon and Google have both said they would hand over a user's data to law enforcement without a warrant, Arlo, Apple, Wyze, and Anker, owner of Eufy, all confirmed to CNET that they won't give authorities access to a user's smart home camera's footage unless they're shown a warrant or court order. These companies would be legally bound to provide data to the authorities if they were shown a legal document. But, unlike Google and Amazon, they will not otherwise share camera footage with law enforcement, even if they had an emergency request for data. Apple's default setting for video cameras connected via Homekit is end-to-end encryption which means the company is unable to share user video at all. In an updated statement, a Google spokesperson clarified that they have never sent Nest data to authorities, "but it's important that we reserve the right to do so."

They added: "To reiterate, and as we've specified in our privacy commitments, we will only share video footage and audio recordings with third-party apps and services that work with our devices if you or a member of your home explicitly gives us permission, and we'll only ask for this permission in order to provide a helpful experience from an approved partner (such as a home security service provider)."

Leaked documents from within TikTok reveal how the company games out responses to tricky questions -- and highlight what the company thinks its biggest public perception problems are. Chief among them: China. From a report: The PR documents, which Gizmodo obtained from within the company, are titled "TikTok Master Messaging" and "TikTok Key Messages." Both are explanations of press talking points in English and include a version translated into a European language. The larger of the two, the 53-page TikTok Master Messaging document, outlines key messages the company wants to present to the public. The dossier's version history shows it was last updated in August 2021 but had been consistently altered since it was created in March 2020.

Right near the top of the list? "Downplay the parent company ByteDance, downplay the China association, downplay AI." All three bullet points are the second, third and fourth lines of the document, second only to "Emphasise TikTok as a brand/platform." Further down, the company advises its employees to stress that, though young people love TikTok, "the app is only for users aged 13 and over." [...]The soundbites include:

"There's a lot of misinformation about TikTok right now. The reality is that the TikTok app isn't even available in China." TikTok used this talking point when responding to the BBC.
"We have not and will not share user data with the Chinese government, and would not do so if asked." TikTok used this one in response to BuzzFeed News.
"We have a number of measures in place to significantly reduce access to user data, and we continue to build those out." TikTok published this talking point on its own blog.

Google was originally planning to get rid of third-party cookies in its browser by 2022, but that was later pushed back to 2023. That cookies deadline for Chrome is now being delayed to 2024. From a report: The Privacy Sandbox is Google's initiative to replace third-party cookies -- as well as cross-site tracking identifiers, fingerprinting, and other covert techniques -- once privacy-conscious alternatives are in place. Since then, Google has been working on new technologies for the past few years and more recently released trials in Chrome for developers to test. Citing "consistent feedback" from partners, Google is "expanding the testing windows for the Privacy Sandbox APIs before we disable third-party cookies in Chrome," with that phase out now set to begin in the second half of 2024.

The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday filed for an injunction to block Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, from buying a virtual reality company called Within, limiting the company's push into the so-called metaverse and signaling a shift in how the agency is approaching tech deals. From a report: The antitrust lawsuit is the first to be filed under Lina Khan, the commission's chair and a leading progressive critic of corporate concentration, against one of the tech giants. Ms. Khan has argued that regulators must stop violations of competition and consumer protection laws when it comes to the bleeding edge of technology, including virtual and augmented reality, and not just in areas of business where companies have already become behemoths. "Meta could have chosen to try to compete," the F.T.C. said in its lawsuit. "Instead, it chose to buy" a top company in what the government called a 'vitally important' category.

Alphabet's Google Maps on Wednesday launched its panoramic Street View service in 10 Indian cities in partnership with Tech Mahindra and Genesys, 11 years after a first attempt ran into regulatory troubles. From a report: The feature, which offers 360-degree views of streets around the world using photos taken by cruising vehicles, has faced privacy complaints and regulatory scrutiny in many countries. The Indian launch comes after Google was denied permission at least twice in the last decade by the government over security concerns. Company executives said on Wednesday it was able to meet the regulatory requirements thanks to a new geospatial policy from India last year, which allows foreign map operators to provide panoramic imagery by licensing the data from local partners. Data collection was entirely done by Tech Mahindra and Genesys, Google said, adding the service would be available in over 50 Indian cities by the end of this year.

Spotify has stopped manufacturing Car Thing, a dashboard accessory designed to make it easier to control the streaming service on your phone from a car. From a report: The change was quietly announced as part of the company's latest earnings release, which notes the decision cost the company $32 million. "Reported Gross Margin was negatively impacted by our decision to stop manufacturing Car Thing," the release reads. "Based on several factors, including product demand and supply chain issues, we have decided to stop further production of Car Thing units," a spokesperson for the company told TechCrunch. "Existing devices will perform as intended. This initiative has unlocked helpful learnings, and we remain focused on the car as an important place for audio."

Microsoft is rallying other big-name cloud-computing providers such as Alphabet's Google and Oracle to press the U.S. government into spreading its spending on such services more widely, taking aim at Amazon's dominance in such contracts. From a report: The software giant has issued talking points to other cloud companies aimed at jointly lobbying Washington to require major government projects to use more than one cloud service, according to people familiar with the effort and a document viewed by The Wall Street Journal. Microsoft also approached VMware, Dell, IBM and HP said the people familiar with the effort. It hasn't yet asked Amazon to join the loose alliance, the people said.

Amazon dominates the cloud-infrastructure industry with a 39% share of the 2021 global market ahead of Microsoft at No. 2 with a 21% share, according to research firm Gartner Inc. Amazon looms even larger in the business of selling cloud services to governments. Amazon's cloud had a 47% share of the 2021 U.S. and Canada public-sector market orders, ahead of 28% for Microsoft, according to Gartner. The National Security Agency last year picked Amazon as the sole vendor for a cloud contract that could be worth potentially as much as $10 billion over the next decade, renewing an existing business relationship.

Mark Zuckerberg believes that Apple and his company are in a "very deep, philosophical competition" to build the metaverse, suggesting the two tech giants are ready to butt heads in selling hardware for augmented and virtual reality. The Verge reports: The Meta CEO told employees earlier this month that they were competing with Apple to determine "what direction the internet should go in," according to a recording of his comments during an internal all-hands meeting obtained by The Verge. He said that Meta would position itself as the more open, cheaper alternative to Apple, which is expected to announce its first AR headset as soon as later this year. "This is a competition of philosophies and ideas, where they believe that by doing everything themselves and tightly integrating that they build a better consumer experience," Zuckerberg said of the brooding rivalry. "And we believe that there is a lot to be done in specialization across different companies, and [that] will allow a much larger ecosystem to exist."

Since rebranding Facebook's company name to Meta, Zuckerberg has been pushing for the concept of interoperability for the metaverse, or what he sees as the next major chapter of computing after mobile phones. Meta recently helped stand up the Metaverse Open Standards Group with Microsoft, Epic Games, and others. The idea is to spur the creation of open protocols that will let people easily move through future immersive, 3D worlds with their virtual goods. Apple is absent from the group, which Zuckerberg called out as not surprising in his comments to employees. He explained how Apple's approach of building hardware and software it tightly controls had worked well with the iPhone, but that for the metaverse, "it's not really clear upfront whether an open or closed ecosystem is going to be better."

[...] If VR and AR do take off like Zuckerberg hopes, it seems he wants to position Meta as the Android to Apple's iOS. There is a parallel to draw already: Meta's Quest headset already allows the side loading of apps that are not approved by Meta's VR app store, similar to how Google's Android allows for sideloading. And even though it just increased the price of the Quest by $100, Meta's hardware is still mostly sold at a loss or breakeven. [...] Zuckerberg's remarks suggest that even as he tries to invent his way out of being under Apple's thumb on mobile, the two tech giants are going to be battling for years to come.

Internet satellite operators OneWeb and Eutelsat are planning to merge in the hopes of becoming a stronger rival to SpaceX's Starlink. Engadget reports: The merger, which is subject to approval from regulators and Eutelsat shareholders, is expected to close by mid-2023 and it values OneWeb at $3.4 billion. Shareholders of OneWeb and Eutelsat will each own half of the combined company. Eutelsat has a fleet of 36 geostationary orbit satellites. These will be combined with OneWeb's cluster of low-earth orbit satellites, which can provide internet access from the skies. OneWeb currently has 428 satellites in orbit of a planned 648 in its first-generation network.

OneWeb and Eutelsat expect to have combined revenues of $1.56 billion in the 2022-23 fiscal year. Eutelsat chair Dominique D'Hinnin and CEO Eva Berneke will remain in those positions in the merged entity. OneWeb investor Sunil Bharti Mittal will become co-chairman. [...] After the expected merger, the UK will retain a "special share" in OneWeb as well as exclusive rights over the company. These grant the government a significant say in national security controls over the network and veto rights over certain decisions, such as the location of OneWeb's headquarters.

An ongoing cybercriminal operation is targeting digital marketing and human resources professionals in an effort to hijack Facebook Business accounts using a newly discovered data-stealing malware. TechCrunch reports: Researchers at WithSecure, the enterprise spin-off of security giant F-Secure, discovered the ongoing campaign they dubbed Ducktail and found evidence to suggest that a Vietnamese threat actor has been developing and distributing the malware since the latter half of 2021. The firm added that the operations' motives appear to be purely financially driven. The threat actor first scouts targets via LinkedIn where it selects employees likely to have high-level access to Facebook Business accounts, particularly those with the highest level of access. The threat actor then uses social engineering to convince the target to download a file hosted on a legitimate cloud host, like Dropbox or iCloud. While the file features keywords related to brands, products, and project planning in an attempt to appear legitimate, it contains data-stealing malware that WithSecure says is the first malware that they have seen specifically designed to hijack Facebook Business accounts.

Once installed on a victim's system, the Ducktail malware steals browser cookies and hijacks authenticated Facebook sessions to steal information from the victim's Facebook account, including account information, location data, and two-factor authentication codes. The malware also allows the threat actor to hijack any Facebook Business account that the victim has sufficient access to simply by adding their email address to the compromised account, which prompts Facebook to to send a link, via email, to the same email address. The recipient -- in this case, the threat actor -- then interacts with the emailed link to gain access to that Facebook Business. The threat actors then leverage their new privileges to replace the account's set financial details in order to direct payments to their accounts or to run Facebook Ad campaigns using money from the victimized firms.

Human rights researcher Frankie Vetch writes via Coda Story: In early July protests broke out in Karakalpakstan, an autonomous region surrounded by deserts in Uzbekistan. It turned nasty on the evening of July 1 when the police began shooting people. The state said that at least 18 people died, with hundreds of others injured. The protests, which occurred in the regional capital of Nukus, erupted in response to a proposed constitutional change that would see the Karakalpakstan shift from being an autonomous region, with the right to secede from Uzbekistan, to a province of the country. In an attempt to quell dissent, the government turned to a tactic that has become increasingly common in the region: they cut off the internet.

Reports indicate that as early as June 26, before protests began, the government was already imposing some form of an information blackout by targeting people's access to mobile internet connection. Later the state began shutting down ATMs and payment services. Since then internet connection has remained largely restricted, with a small respite last week when it was turned on again for two hours. The state of emergency has been lifted in Karakalpakstan but as of Monday it seems the internet has still not been fully restored.

According to Anastasiya Zhyrmont, a campaigner in Eastern Europe and Central Asia for the digital rights non-profit Access Now, getting information out of the region is extremely difficult. "The information flow is very limited," she told me. "Since the first of July the internet has been so unstable. Even if people can get online it can take hours to upload photos, and up to five to 10 minutes to send a simple text message." For journalists and non-profits unable to access the region, this presents a significant challenge to covering the issues. Which is, of course, the purpose.

Facebook parent Meta has raised the price of its Quest 2 virtual reality headset by $100, as the company reckons with inflationary pressures. From a report: Starting Aug. 1, the 128 GB version of the Quest 2 will cost $399, while the 256 GB model will cost $499, Meta said. The company said it hiked the price of the VR headset "in order to continue investing in moving the VR industry forward for the long term." Meta added in a corporate blog post that "the costs to make and ship our products have been on the rise. By adjusting the price of Quest 2, we can continue to grow our investment in groundbreaking research and new product development that pushes the VR industry to new heights."

Shopify is cutting roughly 1,000 workers, or 10% of its global workforce, rolling back a bet on e-commerce growth the technology company made during the pandemic, according to an internal memo. From a report: Tobi Lutke, the company's founder and chief executive, told staff in a memo sent Tuesday that the layoffs are necessary as consumers resume old shopping habits and pull back on the online orders that fueled the company's recent growth. Shopify, which helps businesses set up e-commerce websites, has warned that it expects revenue growth to slow this year, and its shares have tumbled nearly 80% since they peaked in November. It reports quarterly results on Wednesday. Mr. Lutke said he had expected that surging e-commerce sales growth would last past the Covid-19 pandemic's ebb. "It's now clear that bet didn't pay off," said Mr. Lutke in the letter, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. "Ultimately, placing this bet was my call to make and I got this wrong." The Ottawa-based company will cut jobs in all its divisions, though most of the layoffs will occur in recruiting, support and sales units, said Mr. Lutke. "We're also eliminating over-specialized and duplicate roles, as well as some groups that were convenient to have but too far removed from building products," he wrote. Staff who are being let go will be notified on Tuesday.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: China's latest launch of a huge rocket is, once again, raising alarm that the debris will crash into the Earth's surface in an uncertain location and at great speed. On Sunday afternoon local time, the Long March 5B blasted off from the Wenchang launch site on the southern island province of Hainan, carrying a solar-powered new lab, the Wentian experiment module, to be added to China's Tiangong Space Station. But the size of the heavy-lift rocket -- it stands 53.6 meters (176 feet) tall and weighs 837,500 kilograms (more than 1.8 million pounds) -- and the risky design of its launch process have led experts to fear that some debris from its core stage could fail to burn up as it reenters Earth's atmosphere.

As with two previous launches, the rocket shed its empty 23-ton first stage in orbit, meaning that it will continue to loop the Earth over coming days as it gradually comes closer to landing. This flight path is difficult to predict because of fluctuations in the atmosphere caused by changes in solar activity. Although experts consider the chances of debris hitting an inhabited area very low, many also believe China is taking an unnecessary risk. After the core stage of the last launch fell into the Indian Ocean, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said China was "failing to meet responsible standards regarding their space debris," including minimizing risks during reentry and being transparent about operations. China rejects accusations of irresponsibility. In response to concerns about last year's launch, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said the likelihood of damage was "extremely low."

Many scientists agree with China that the odds of debris causing serious damage are tiny. An article published in the journal Nature Astronomy this month put the chance that, under current launch practices, someone would die or be injured from parts of a rocket making an uncontrolled reentry at 1 in 10 over the next decade. But many believe launch designs like the Long March 5B's are an unnecessary risk. "Launch providers have access to technologies and mission designs today that could eliminate the need for most uncontrolled re-entries," the authors wrote. They proposed global safety standards mandating controlled reentry.
UPDATE: It crashed into the Indian Ocean.

Intel Linux GPU driver developers have released an update that results in a massive 100X boost in ray tracing performance. This is something to be celebrated, of course. However, on the flip side, the driver was 100X slower than it should have been because of a memory allocation oversight. Tom's Hardware reports: Linux-centric news site Phoronix reports that a fix merged into the open-source Intel Mesa Vulkan driver was implemented by Intel Linux graphics driver engineering stalwart Lionel Landwerlin on Thursday. The developer wryly commented that the merge request, which already landed in Mesa 22.2, would deliver "Like a 100x (not joking) improvement." Intel has been working on Vulkan raytracing support since late 2020, but this fix is better late than never.

Usually, the Vulkan driver would ensure temporary memory used for Vulkan raytracing work would be in local memory, i.e., the very fast graphics memory onboard the discrete GPU. A line of code was missing, so this memory allocation housekeeping task wasn't set. Thus, the Vulkan driver would shift ray tracing data to slower offboard system memory and back. Think of the continued convoluted transfers to this slower memory taking place, slowing down the raytracing performance significantly. It turns out, as per our headline, that setting a flag for "ANV_BO_ALLOC_LOCAL_MEM" ensured that the VRAM would be used instead, and a 100X performance boost was the result. "Mesa 22.2, which includes the new code, is due to be branched in the coming days and will be included in a bundle of other driver refinements, which should reach end-users by the end of August," adds the report.

Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon launched a public effort Monday to scrap the leap second, an occasional extra tick that keeps clocks in sync with the Earth's actual rotation. US and French timekeeping authorities concur. From a report: Since 1972, the world's timekeeping authorities have added a leap second 27 times to the global clock known as the International Atomic Time (TAI). Instead of 23:59:59 changing to 0:0:0 at midnight, an extra 23:59:60 is tucked in. That causes a lot of indigestion for computers, which rely on a network of precise timekeeping servers to schedule events and to record the exact sequence of activities like adding data to a database.

The temporal tweak causes more problems -- like internet outages -- than benefits, they say. And dealing with leap seconds ultimately is futile, the group argues, since the Earth's rotational speed hasn't actually changed much historically. "We are predicting that if we just stick to the TAI without leap second observation, we should be good for at least 2,000 years," research scientist Ahmad Byagowi of Facebook parent company Meta said via email. "Perhaps at that point we might need to consider a correction."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. Energy Department on Monday announced it intends to loan a joint venture of General Motors and LG Energy Solution $2.5 billion to help finance construction of new lithium-ion battery cell manufacturing facilities. The conditional commitment for the loan to Ultium Cells LLC for facilities in Ohio, Tennessee, and Michigan is expected to close in the coming months and comes from the government's Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing (ATVM) loan program, which has not funded a new loan since 2010. The plan, first reported by Reuters, would mark the Energy Department's first loan exclusively for a battery cell manufacturing project under the vehicle program.

The program previously provided low-cost government loans to Tesla, Ford and Nissan, which included some cell manufacturing. "We have to have vehicle manufacturing capacity but also battery manufacturing capacity," Jigar Shah, who directs the Energy Department loan program office, told Reuters in an interview. "This project provides one of the newest additions to battery manufacturing scale in this country." [...] Shah said the department has received more than $18 billion in loan requests from the auto program and expects at least another $5 billion in requests that are being actively prepared. "I do think there will more loans issued," Shah said, declining to offer a precise timeline. The program currently has $17.7 billion in lending authority available. Shah said "for motivated borrowers, they can close these loans rather quickly." Reuters notes that GM and LG are investing more than $7 billion via the venture. Production at its Ohio battery plant is expected to begin in August. Production is set to begin at its Tennessee plant in late 2023 and in Michigan in 2024.